The Buffalo Wars
by
Susan L. Nasr
B.A., Biology
Hood College, 2004
Submitted to the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN SCIENCE WRITING
at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
September 2006
MASSACHUSETTS INS
OF TECHNOLOGY
© Susan L. Nasr. All Rights Reserved.
LIBRARIES
JUL 10 2006
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce or to distribute publicly paper
and electronic copies of this thesis in whole or in part.
Signature of Author
Department of Humanities
Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies
May 28, 2006
Certified by
,
-
-
-
Marcia Bart siak
Visiting Professor of Science Writing
Thesis Advisor
Accepted by
E
.
Robert Kanigel
Professor of Science Writing
Director, Graduate Program in Science Writing
ARCHIVES
The Buffalo Wars
by
Susan L. Nasr
Submitted to the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies on May 28, 2006 in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Science Writing
Abstract
The wandering buffalo of Yellowstone National Park are the subject of a heated debate in
the western United States. The animals carry a disease called brucellosis, which infects
both buffalo and cattle and has economic consequences for ranchers. Some ranchers fear
that buffalo, as they migrate out of Yellowstone in search of forage, will transmit the
disease to cattle around the park and jeopardize their financial well-being. The Park
Service and other government agencies have tried to control the situation by exercising a
lethal form of boundary control for buffalo, though other wildlife species are unregulated.
Animal advocates dispute the agencies' tactics. Native Americans wonder why the
buffalo are entirely under agency control. The park has become somewhat of a war zone,
where the groups quarrel throughout the migratory season. Their disagreement is about
much more than the animals themselves, taking root in even older and deeper conflicts.
Yet despite the tangled nature of the problem, there may be room for negotiation and
eventual resolution.
Thesis Advisor: Marcia Bartusiak
Title: Visiting Professor of Science Writing
Acknowledgments
In Montana and elsewhere, thanks to:
Rick Wallen for directing my research and helping me to sort fact from fiction.
The Buffalo Field Campaign for allowing me to stay in their cabin and for the unique
experience of cross-country skiing alongside a herd of buffalo.
Jack Rhyan for explaining brucellosis so well that I was thoroughly disgusted.
Jim Hagenbarth for hosting a tour of his ranch in Dillon and openly sharing his views.
Marion Cherry and Nedra Chandler for critical reading of my drafts.
My deepest thanks to:
The program's professors, Robert Kanigel, Tom Levenson, Alan Lightman, and Boyce
Rensberger, each for teaching me skills I needed to complete this project.
My talented classmates, whose writing and companionship inspired me.
Cormack Gates, the bison expert, for his wealth of information and willingness to teach.
My parents and friends for their support.
My thesis advisor, Marcia Bartusiak, who has a sixth sense for students in distress and
greets each one with a warm pot of tea. Thanks to Marcia for assuming the many guises
that a good advisor does----"editor," "cheerleader," "therapist," and "dominatrix"-all of
which I needed at some point.
The Buffalo Wars
Most everyone knows Yellowstone National Park, the idyllic preserve at the
juncture of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, where the coyotes howl and the buffalo roam.
But many don't know Yellowstone in winter, when thousands of hoofed animals leave
the park in search of food.
The town of Gardiner, Montana, is often host to these wintertime tourists. As
vehicles leave Gardiner to enter Yellowstone through the historic Roosevelt Arch, they
are met by buffalo headed toward town. The buffalo amble through the arch, down a
shallow hill, and stop to graze among the picnic tables of a park. Casually, they move to
a high school football field to browse between goalposts. One female buffalo pauses
outside the colorful window of a second grade classroom, disrupting bus traffic.
The town is used to the influx. In fact, the incoming wildlife is a source of pride
and a bit of a town joke. On the edge of town, the Yellowstone Village Inn has posted a
sign on its lawn that reads "Elk Stay Free." Every winter, the elk bed down under it.
"Yeah, they like it a lot," says the hotel clerk. "We get lots of critters."
Down the street, a mule deer tears needles from the shrubbery in the parking lot of
a local restaurant. Once discovered, she picks up her head, rotates her ears like satellite
dishes, then trots off to a backyard.
Some forty miles southwest, near the town of West Yellowstone, the story is
similar. Lines of buffalo lumber across route 191, headed for a peninsula called Horse
Butte So many cross the road each year that a highway sign warns tractor trailers of
"wildlife migration in progress."
Buffalo migrate because of snowfall. They begin the winter on high plateaus
deep within the park, where snow accumulates during harsh winters. If snow piles up
and crusts over the grass, the buftalo move downward in search of forage. They follow
rivers and streams out of the park to historic wintering areas. Groups in the north travel
along the Lamar and Yellowstone rivers toward the northern border. As they journey
downslope, dry winter grasses and sedges begin to poke slender tassels through the snow;
grassy hillsides open; then the snow cover is gone. Gardiner is a gateway to wide, flat,
grassland-a buffalo's promised 'and. In the west, buffalo follow the Firehole and
Madison Rivers, Cougar Creek, and Duck Creek. That path leads them slowly down to
Horse Butte and the Madison River Valley, where the snow is fluffy and easily pushed
aside.
But the buffalo do not stop at the towns just over park lines; they also enter the
patchwork of lands beyond. They wander out of Wyoming, through national forests, and
onto private ranches in Montana and Idaho.
For some, just one buffalo outside of Yellowstone is too many. The animals carry
a disease called brucellosis, caused by the bacterium Brucellaabortus. The disease
infects wildlife and cattle, and some ranchers fear that Yellowstone's wandering buffalo
will pass it to their herds. Brucellosis does little to buffalo, causing occasional abortions.
But in cattle, the results are more serious-at least from a rancher's point of view. Cows
abort and produce less milk, and bulls can become infertile. In one rancher's words, an
infection in his herd would simply "break me."
For decades the Park has struggled with how to manage the problem. In 2000, it
and four other government agencies released the newest strategy for keeping diseased
buffalo inside Yellowstone. It is a unique set of rules that applies to no other wild animal
in the park. Inside park boundaries, the buffalo belong to the National Park Service. The
current population of about 4,000 are free to wander, graze, and rub the pine trees. But
those that step over the park lines become the state's responsibility.
Should the buffalo set foot in Montana, Montana's Department of Livestock
(DOL) and other agencies round up the strays, shuttle them into corrals near park borders,
test them, vaccinate them, and send suspected Brucella carriers to slaughter. Montana
recently added a buffalo hunt, suspending the roundups at times to offer fifty residents
(chosen by lottery) the opportunity to shoot buffalo outside park lines.
According to the agencies, it is all for disease control. Brucellosis must not reach
Montana's cows, say both the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the
disease-control arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and many state veterinarians,
because if it does, the disease may spread to cattle herds in other states, as the beef
network extends far.
But the buffalo know of no boundaries and no plan: they simply know that to
survive the winter, they must find good grass, wherever it may be.
Yellowstone's buffalo are icons-horns, humps, and the sound of thunder on the
American prairie. They are also at the center of one of the ugliest modern wildlife
disputes in the West. Ranchers, environmentalists, the government, and many others are
using longstanding conflicts, some centuries old, to feed the fight over this symbolic
creature. One biologist called it "one of the most complex issues on the continent... I've
never seen anything like this."
In Montana coffee shops, amidst orders of decaf and short stacks, you can hear
residents discussing the issue. Early in January 2006, the wandering buffalo made the
front page of The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, with world news and sports pushed to the
back. The headline read: "Hazing Catastrophe: 12 bison go through Hebgen Lake ice,
two die." The photo said it all. Several shivering buffalo, wide-eyed, fur crusted with
ice, bobbed in Hebgen Lake. They were among the first wanderers of the season,
crossing the western boundary and making a break for Horse Butte. As livestock agents
on snowmobiles moved, or "hazed," them back towards Yellowstone, the animals fell
through the ice. Most were rescued, but two didn't make it.
"That's a shame," says Jim Hagenbarth over lunch as he recalls the article.
Hagenbarth is a cattle rancher, white hair tucked under a flannel cap, dressed in worn
jeans and hiking boots. Along with his brother, he runs ranches in Montana and Idaho
that have been in his family since the 1880s. The Idaho property is forty miles west of
the park's western border, along a path that buffalo occasionally travel. What he fears
more than a buffalo drowning in Hebgen Lake is one transmitting brucellosis to his cattle.
"This is a very serious issue," he says. "If we get brucellosis in our herds, we're broke."
Hagenbarth calculates his business decisions to the last strand of hay. In winter,
he runs his cattle on dusty ground in Montana, and in summer trucks them to more fertile
land in Idaho to give birth. "When it's all said and done...we're raising an animal that
when we sell it...is the ideal weight to go into the feedlot," Hagenbarth says.
Ranching expenses are already high. "First off, you have seed...Second, is labor.
Then you have taxes... then paperwork... Then insurance, of course, because of the
liability, is very costly. And equipment... And gas, and power, and propane...and
electricity." Protecting his cattle from brucellosis has been an added burden. Hagenbarth
says he has spent $300,000 since 1970 vaccinating and testing his cattle for "a disease
that's out there, but we've never had." The tests and vaccinations cost money, and so do
their effects on cattle. The vaccine can make cows sick and prevent them from putting on
enough weight to go to the feedlot. "If that animal is not eating, sleeping, [or] drinking
water...it costs you money," he says.
An actual infection in his herd would break the budget. APHIS veterinarians
would likely detect his diseased cows on the feedlot. They would kill those cows and
then show up at his ranch. If tests turned up a widespread infection, "they're most likely
going to come in and kill every cow I have...I would be out of business," he says, too old
to start over from scratch, even with compensation money from the government.
Hagenbarth thinks his herd could become infected. Over the years, several
Yellowstone bulls have wandered onto his Idaho land, a few during summer when his
cattle were grazing there. Hagenbarth takes no chances. The last time two bulls got too
close, "I shot them," he says.
A handful of ranchers live closer to Yellowstone-about twenty within ten miles
of the park. They own just over 2,000 cattle, most grazing on private ranches in the
summer, except for one herd present year-round. Around 600 more cattle graze public
lands in the warmer months. The agencies say only a fraction of these animals occupy
areas that Yellowstone's buffalo regularly try to use. But brucellosis is a state and
national issue. One infected herd can cause a chain of exposed herds to be quarantined
by APHIS. If a state has two infected herds in the same year, ranchers must test their
cattle for the disease before shipping them interstate. State veterinarians can block
imports from infected states at any time, and foreign countries can restrict beef imports
from nations whose cattle carry the disease.
Hagenbarth supports the government's effort to manage brucellosis, but wishes
Yellowstone would go even further-by killing every diseased buffalo within its bounds,
thus eliminating any chance of a sick wanderer ever reaching a ranch. "There's no other
way to do it," he insists. "It's not very digestible. And it's very difficult...Publicly,
killing is not fun...[but] it's part of the solution sometimes."
Others think differently. Buffalo Field Campaign workers have watched,
sometimes blinking back tears, as thousands of buffalo have died in the name of disease
management. The group is a motley collection of nonprofit employees and volunteers
who call themselves "buffalo advocates." They live in a log cabin near Hebgen Lake,
where the buffalo fell in. Visitors can rap on the door using a knocker shaped like a
buffalo's head, and inside, can pause in contemplation in front of the buffalo altar.
The group crystallized in 1997 during an especially snowy winter, when the
deaths of many wayward buffalo drove a Native American and a disgruntled park visitor
to form an organization to protect the animals. Long-timers, like Dan Brister, a carpenter
from Montana, and Stephany Seay, from the east coast, have been members since the
beginning. Others are vacation crusaders, like Jean Michaud from Quebec, who came
south for a few weeks to fight on the buffalos' side. The group has been as short-staffed
as six and as strong as sixty, sometimes too poor to pay for groceries, sometimes
supported by wealthy donors, including country singer Bonnie Raitt, outfitting company
Patagonia, and Subaru. All unite behind a common vision-that buffalo are sentient
creatures with inherent rights-and a common cause-to oppose any plan that blocks
buffalo migration. "Might as well dam the ocean as keep wild buffalo from migrating,"
Seay once remarked.
The Campaign says park visitors would be appalled by how the managing
agencies treat buffalo. "The American bison is treated worse than any other form of
wildlife in the national park system," they claim. The Park has built pens near its
borders, both inside and outside, to trap wandering buffalo. Though visitors rarely see it,
buffalo that cross the lines are chased into the pens, clamped into stalls, and jabbed with
testing needles. This wrangling, the Campaign fears, teaches buffalo to act like
domesticated animals, not wild ones. Those buffalo marked for slaughter fare no better,
as they are trucked live to slaughterhouses, sometimes growing so nervous in the trucks
that there are gorings en route. The agencies' hazing vehicles have sent buffalo into
barbed wire fences, and most recently, into frozen lakes. Other migrating wildlife suffer
with the buffalo-elk, moose, and deer get caught up in the buffalo haze.
Brister provided the Chronicle with its front-page photo of buffalo floundering in
the lake, hoping to attract some negative attention to the agencies during this year's
migratory season. "I think they realized that they really messed up and that the public
wasn't with them on that," he says.
Scientists from the managing agencies view the same events quite differently.
Marion Cherry, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, says that penning
buffalo doesn't domesticate them, as it doesn't change their behavior permanently. She
says the animals get "habituated," used to pens or humans, but stresses that the familiarity
can be unlearned over time. Furthermore, she says the number of buffalo that "suffer"
after crossing park lines is low compared to the number that stay in the park. Rick
Wallen, a bison biologist with the Park Service, agrees. He says that only a small
fraction of the population is chased, captured, or penned each season. "And the whole
rest of the population doesn't know that that's even going on," he says.
Overall, the agencies stand behind their plan, considering it the best way to
protect ranchers from disease while allowing buffalo to be "wild" inside the park. It
"may not be the plan that every single person in the world would like to see, but
it's...defensible and credible," says Wallen. Cherry agrees. "We don't have any
brucellosis in Montana. There are still a bunch of bison...And they're free-roaming in
the park.... I don't know what we could have done differently," she says.
Just ninety miles north of Hebgen Lake, in Bozeman, Montana, Scott Frazier, a
member of Montana's Crow Nation, wonders why the government is trapping buffalo at
all. "Native Americans, we don't think like that. We believe in freedom," he says. Long
before the time of Lewis and Clark, Frazier's tribe hunted enormous free-ranging herds in
the region. Slowly, though, that changed. Settlers arrived, renaming the animals
"buffalo," though the scientific name was bison, and the Crow had long called them
Tatonka.
Wars reshuffled territories. The Crow were confined to a reservation and
eventually ceded all of their land in the Yellowstone area to the government. Shortly
after the Park was created in 1872, all the buffalo were inside Yellowstone, and Frazier's
tribe had none.
In the early 1930s, the Crow bought new buffalo from both the Park and
Montana's National Bison Range. "It was a big deal when my clan grandpa Robbie
Yellowtail made the deal," Frazier says. "He was the tribal chairman, and he made the
deal with Yellowstone. They came up in these big trucks...and let [the buffalo] go right
in Crow Agency, and it made the front page of the Billings Gazette." Indeed, the
animals' release into the reservation's capital city made The New York Times. But in the
early 1960s, the herd tested positive for brucellosis. The government returned to
exterminate the animals, and by 1966 Frazier's tribe was without buffalo again. "They
just shot every one of them," he remembers. Five years later, the tribe reintroduced
buffalo for a second time, this time from a disease-free herd from North Dakota's
Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Today, these animals populate the Crow Reservation.
The Crow still receive buffalo from Yellowstone, but none alive. When
wandering buffalo are sent to slaughter, the agencies distribute the heads, hides, and meat
to Native American tribes that will accept them. Frazier's tribe does, but for reasons he
says are less than ideal: "People are hungry. We take the meat. We tend to not waste
things." He likens the situation to starving people eating out of a trash dump.
For the Crow, buffalo are sacred creatures to be used in religious ceremony, not
gunned down by officials. Frazier sees the policy as yet another insult-to his tribe and
to the animals they revere. "You have an item that's contaminated...you execute it, and
then you give it to a group of people to pray with," he says. "Who gave them the
authority to distribute sacred items to native people?" he wonders. "That's not what we
want."
Frazier says the killing tramples upon his tribe's future, which is tied to the birth
of a rare, albino buffalo calf. If and when the calf is born, "we feel that our religion will
start to go again, and pick up the momentum we need to get out of poverty, to get out of
drugs and gangs, and all the things that are complicating our tribal life." The way he sees
it, the government is dashing his tribe's hopes. "We go into these seasons, and all these
women buffalo get killed, and each one has the opportunity to give us the white calf. So
we're like, 'why are you doing that?'"
As for the disease problem, he thinks the government should remove the ranchers
from the land outside the park. "They won't sell," he says. "You have to go in and
condemn it-take it from them, like they did the Indians."
Here is the crux of the problem, the reason it is like few others. Frazier's
comment highlights how the conflict runs deeper than the plan; it is a dislike and distrust
felt to the bones. It is shared by all-ranchers, government agency employees, and
buffalo advocates alike.
"They are ignorant," says Michaud, simply, of ranchers.
Hagenbarth in turn has an equally low opinion of the environmentalists, at least
those that interfere with his business. "They don't give a damn. They don't. And you
know what? They're just insane when you talk to them," he says.
The Campaign suggests the agencies are incompetent wildlife managers.
"Livestock managers...don't seem to know anything about bison," says one member.
Although buffalo are a symbol of the park, they'd like to see the Park Service stripped of
the buffalo badges on their uniforms. "False advertising," they say.
Agency scientists in response complain of environmentalists who know too little
about the ecology of buffalo or disease. "They haven't read the recent literature," one
scientist said. "They don't know what we know now....And I just say, oh, man. Let me
find some old tape recording and educate you."
The conflict rolls on each day of the migratory season. As Hagenbarth drives to
his ranch office in Dillon, Montana, the Campaign volunteers, at quarter to six in the
morning, begin the day's rove. "Rove" is simply a code word for mechanized snooping.
The volunteers follow the same routes every day-in blizzards if need bedriving the roads, skiing the forests, and monitoring the neighborhoods outside the park's
boundaries to film the "plight" of the migrating buffalo.
They tally the abuses on their cabin whiteboard:
Total Yellowstone Buffalo Killed 2005-2006: 903
Shot by Montana Department of Livestock (DOL): 3
Drowned During DOL Hazing Operation: 2
Shot by Hunters: 45
Slaughtered by Yellowstone National Park: 849
Died in Confinement in Yellowstone National Park: 3
Shot by Yellowstone National Park: 1
Like a police force, they patrol in old station wagons outfitted like squad cars,
with wireless radios, camcorders, still cameras, and binoculars on hand.
In late January, Jean Michaud and Ryan Kurtz patrol Montana state route 287,
stopping at the doorstep of Dale Koelzer. His house is located at a critical spot-exactly
on the park's western border with Montana. The Campaign finds Koelzer suspicious, and
they claim, a buffalo-hater. They say that in the past he has baited his backyard with hay
so that licensed hunters could shoot buffalo as the animals ate. It is this type of
questionable hunting the volunteers are worried about today. But there are no buffalo in
Koelzer's backyard.
Well after sunrise, Kurtz spots three bulls in another backyard. They are foraging,
knee-deep in snow, heads moving like plows to uncover grass below.
Kurtz doesn't think buffalo should be kept from the backyards of Montana. "Who
needs to stop them?," he asks. "Buffalo are an asset in every way." And he means that
from a practical standpoint. More buffalo in Montana could mean more hunters buying
licenses and more visitors to the park. At a gas station, Michaud pulls a handful of
brochures from a rack near the front door. One shows tourists on a snowmobile, smiling
and watching a line of buffalo cross a trail. "Three million people in two months come
here to see the buffalo. That's a lot of money," he says.
Just before eleven, Kurtz spots a Montana game warden on a snowmobile
traveling alongside the road. "Oh, look who it is!" he exclaims. "Let's follow him and
see where he goes." Kurtz knows this man's name-Jim Smolczynski. The warden
crosses the road and speeds onto Hebgen Lake. Kurtz pulls out the binoculars. "He's
going to check out the buffalo they hazed onto the ice. Jean, slow down! I wonder if
they're thinking about finishing their botched job last week." As it turns out,
Smolczynski is merely collecting safety cones from the lake, used to divert snowmobilers
from weak spots in the ice. He loads the cones onto his snowmobile and speeds away
again.
By mid-afternoon, the volunteers have made their tenth pass along route 287 and
turn right, heading toward Yellowstone Village.
"HOBNOB central," says Kurtz, as Michaud pulls into the small tract of houses.
The residents of Yellowstone Village have named themselves HOBNOB, standing for
Horse Butte Neighbors of the Buffalo. "Buffalo like to graze in the yards," Kurtz says.
Every spring, just before the local ranchers bring their cows to the area for the season's
green-up, the buffalo are chased out. Livestock agents sweep through the village, flying
helicopters over rooftops and running snowmobiles through yards, to remove buffalo
from public land and the vicinity of the private ranches. Last spring, the HOBNOBs
decided to override this policy and unofficially re-zoned their properties. In every
window and driveway in Yellowstone Village, a bright yellow sign announces a "bison
safe zone" where "no shooting or harassing of bison [is] allowed." HOBNOBs tend to
sympathize with the Campaign, who kindly printed their signs.
In retaliation, Koelzer and a local rancher posted signs in their yards that said,
"Buffalo hunters welcome."
The neighborhood-by-neighborhood allegiances near the park border have started
to resemble gang territories. "We're welcome here," Kurtz says of Yellowstone Village.
"DOL is not." Yet the safe zone signs have not stopped the livestock agents from making
the spring sweep anyway, herding buffalo back into the park and shooting those that
don't comply.
The buffalo conflict has already erupted into episodes of maliciousness. This past
spring, Campaign patrols fell victim to a drive-by paintball shooting. "We were shot at
on four or five different occasions," says Kurtz. At least three times, volunteers returned
to their cars to notice loosened lugnuts. "Everyone knows what our cars are. They're old
Subarus. And they know where we park," he says. Once the loose wheel came off while
a volunteer was driving, sending the car sliding off the road. And there have been brute,
face-to-face scraps. One pasture-owner near the western border reportedly punched a
volunteer in the stomach during a disagreement. "He was in real good with the DOL,"
Kurtz says. One of the agents personally jammed a camera into a volunteer's face, Kurtz
says.
Of course, gang wars can end in arrests, and the Campaign has had its share. In
years past, volunteers who ventured too close to hazing operations were charged with
interference and sent to the Bozeman jail.
And as in a gang war, each offense further entrenches each side and begets deeper
resentments. Kurtz says the loosened lugnuts satisfy him in a dark way, "because it
shows we're being effective."
How the exact boundaries of Yellowstone Park came to be established was
somewhat arbitrary. They were drawn by an unassuming geologist named Ferdinand
Hayden. While conducting a survey in 1871, Hayden, who was working for the U.S.
Geological Survey, explored the area and saw "a great natural curiosity, great
geysers...water-spouts, and hot springs." The region was otherwise barren and
mountainous, unfit for farming.
Though Hayden did not know it, congressmen were already discussing a national
park in the region. While the exact history of the legislation is cloudy, one Kansas senator
reportedly drew up a bill to set up a public park on the land that Hayden "platted."
Hayden's map showed that all the geologic wonders resided within a box, forty by fortyfour miles square. Thus the bill called for a national park "substantially forty miles
square."
In hindsight, the boundaries simply placed a box around a river. They included
"all the basin where the Yellowstone [River] has its source." These borders, framing the
natural wonders most people thought were important, made perfect sense to the geologist
at the time.
And to Congress. The bill passed and was signed in 1872 by President Ulysses S.
Grant, making Yellowstone the world's first national park, a nearly perfect square.
Before the time of Columbus, tens of millions of buffalo roamed the grasslands
between the Rocky Mountains and Mississippi River known as the Great Plains. By the
time of Hayden's survey, however, a slew of forces, including native and European
hunters, fur traders, and livestock grazing on the Plains, had reduced the plains buffalo to
a few scattered herds, including a few hundred animals inside of Yellowstone. Hayden's
square excluded vast amounts of former buffalo habitat, but neither the geologist nor
Congress knew it at the time.
The job of managing Yellowstone's buffalo fell on the U.S. Army in 1886. Park
historian Mary Ann Franke reports that in the 1890s a concerned Gardiner resident wrote
to army officials: "I will drop you a few lines as a favor for the buffaloes, as they are
about extinct." Cavalry guarded park borders, but poachers broke through, and by 1902
the animals were nearly extinguished; only 23 wild plains buffalo remained, not just in
Yellowstone, but in the world. The Army began restoration the next year, transplanting
domesticated buffalo from ranches in Texas and Nebraska into the park, where they lived
in a corral that came to be known as the Buffalo Ranch, next to the dwindling wild herd.
The Park Service took charge in 1916, eventually dismantling the Buffalo Ranch,
but continuing some curious practices, including selling buffalo to meat dealers, killing
"undesirable" species, and stampeding buffalo for distinguished visitors. Managers at the
time worried that without visitors and funding, the park itself would go extinct, so they
followed what Rick Wallen calls "a ranching zoo kind of philosophy." For the next four
decades, the Park culled buffalo to limit their numbers.
In 1967 the Park Service adopted a new, ecologically minded philosophy called
natural regulation. It reflected a changed view of the park, one in which all the organisms
inside were connected by an ecological web that excluded humans. Under that policy,
the park stopped controlling animal numbers and let nature take its course. Park
biologists were not sure what would happen to buffalo under this policy, but they soon
found out. The population grew.
Fewer than 500 buffalo inhabited the park in the late 1960s. "In 1980 or 1981, the
population reached 2,000 animals. Everyone threw up their arms and said, 'oh, my gosh,
we've got a huge population. Now what are we going to do?'...And then in the early
1990s, the population hit about 3,000. Alarm!...Now what are we going to do?... Well,
since the spring of 1997, the population has done nothing but grow rapidly," Rick Wallen
says. The winter of 2006 began with nearly 5,000 animals (though towards the end of
this year's harsh migratory season, the population was down to around 4,000).
Buffalo conservation, while solving the problem of extinction, has introduced the
new problem of population growth. Natural regulation provides an engine-it preserves,
at least inside the park, the buffalo's ability to breed without hunters or major predators to
check their numbers. That's why the population is growing, and during heavy winters
entering surrounding states. Ecologists predict that the population will continue to grow
until a devastating winter causes starvation; at which point, the population would dip,
then climb again. One scientific review concluded that the growth allowed by natural
regulation is the "fundamental force pushing bison out of [Yellowstone], contributing
both to increased risk of transmission of B. abortusto livestock and the need to take
action to deal with bison in unwanted places."
Wallen thinks that if buffalo were allowed to stay in the surrounding states, they
would recolonize the Great Plains. The explanation is simple. Patches of open grassland
remain around Yellowstone and hopscotch up to Canada, and down to Texas. Buffalo are
prolific breeders and explorers. If given the chance, their dense population centers would
relocate outside the park. The centers would expand, then move north. The same push
would happen southward. If the borders were dropped, migrations would become
emigrations-all the way to Canada and Texas. "The bison just want to go home," one
Gardiner ecologist told a western newspaper. Another biologist who created a computer
model of the expansion titled it, "The Great Plains Bison 'Repatriation' Scenario."
Wallen acknowledges that buffalo expansion puts pressure on surrounding states
but still stands by the current park policy. He wishes the states luck in dealing with the
animals that spill into their territories. "We have no jurisdiction beyond the park
boundary," he says-a boundary that was arbitrary to begin with.
***
Accompanying the problem of buffalo expansion has been that of disease.
Yellowstone managers first detected brucellosis in 1917, after noticing stillbirths at the
Buffalo Ranch. No one knows when the buffalo became infected, though historians
believe it happened some time after the turn of the century. To Brucella abortus, buffalo
have always been an ideal target, an enormous mass of flesh to colonize. But the bacteria
could not have planned their entry into buffalo. Something must have carried them there.
Cattle living inside the park were the likely source, and several possibilities for
transmission have been considered. In 1904, a scout on a government mission plucked a
female buffalo calf from Yellowstone's wild herd, nursed her on a milk cow, and
deposited her at the Buffalo Ranch. If that cow was infected, the slurping calf might have
swallowed live bacteria, but historian and biologist Mary Meagher finds this unlikely.
There are other cows, however, that could have been the transmitters. For many years,
hotels and outposts throughout the park kept cattle on premises in order to feed guests.
An infected cow could have dropped a stillborn fetus while grazing, and a buffalo out to
pasture could have licked it and gotten the disease. Meagher thinks this happened around
1915, when buffalo from the Ranch were pastured near some grazing cattle.
Regardless of the cow responsible, Yellowstone at first did little to manage the
disease. They focused on feeding and culling buffalo to keep them in the park. In 1934
APHIS began to pay ranchers to slaughter infected cows, but still no action was taken for
buffalo.
At this time Yellowstone managers testing buffalo found that the infection was
spreading. By the 1940s, the park established a brucellosis testing facility. Park Service
rangers tried a questionable buffalo vaccine and continued winter feeding but did little
else. They thought it impossible eradicate the disease, and even unwise to do so, as a
"clean" herd might suffer a massive outbreak later.
The Park ran trials in the 1960s, testing, slaughtering, and vaccinating small
groups of buffalo, but concluded that the "never-ending" process would leave few buffalo
for visitors to see. They instituted a new strategy of chasing and shooting wanderers at
park borders.
Throughout the 1970s, the livestock industry came after Yellowstone like a
stampede, calling on the Park to rid its buffalo of brucellosis. The Livestock
Conservation Association, U.S. Animal Health Association, Wyoming Livestock and
Sanitary Board, Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, and Montana Board of Livestock
all made public statements asking the Park Service to reinstate testing, vaccination, and
slaughter to eradicate the disease. The Park Service deflected them with polite letters,
continuing its single solution-chasing and gunning down those that breached Hayden's
square.
In the late 1970s, the Park relaxed even further. On Department of Interior
orders, rangers stopped killing buffalo that stepped over park lines, leaving states to deal
with the wanderers. Montana issued hunting licenses. The hunts drew so many
protestors and news cameras that they had to be discontinued. Meanwhile, Yellowstone's
buffalo herds were swelling, and large groups were leaving on park roads.
As buffalo marched into Montana, state veterinarians and APHIS watched
nervously. In 1994 the veterinarians issued a threat: Montana must shoot the incoming
buffalo or else test marketable cattle for brucellosis according to their interpretation of
APHIS rules. In response, Montana sued the federal government. The way they saw it,
government policies were crippling ranchers. The government allowed diseased buffalo
out of Yellowstone, but at the same time punished ranchers when diseased animals
entered the surrounding states.
The judge ruled that all parties should stop their squabbling. The state of
Montana, the Park, and APHIS needed to work together, divvy up responsibility, and
fashion a joint agreement. The result was an interim plan that began in 1996. In the
west, state livestock agents would capture and test migrating buffalo, killing those pegged
as carriers and releasing the disease-free. In the north, rangers would capture and
slaughter all wanderers. In a terrible coincidence, the winter of 1996 was a brutal one,
dropping ice on Yellowstone's plateaus and sending the buffalo out in droves. Following
convenient adaptations of the plan, livestock agents shot buffalo like a firing squad, and
park rangers tested buffalo and let the negative ones go. More than 1,000 buffalo died-
some were shot; some were trucked to slaughter; others dropped while on the run, the
whole ordeal broadcast on televisions throughout the country.
Critics watched and responded. Wildlife advocates, including the Defenders of
Wildlife and the Sierra Club had already sued, claiming the Park Service could not trap
buffalo in a wildlife preserve. Some sympathetic Park Service rangers wore black tape
over their badges in support of the advocates' sentiment. Making a more blatant
statement, an activist burst into a policymakers' meeting in Gardiner and dumped buffalo
guts on the Montana governor.
By 1998 it was time for the agencies to release their final plan for public
comment. They stuck with the one drafted after the court case, with a few exceptions.
All wandering buffalo would now be tested, negative animals would be vaccinated, and
when the herd grew larger than 3,000, all wanderers would be killed.
Historian Franke terms that plan the "disagreeable agreement," as many from the
public mailed in comments to say they disagreed. The Fund for Animals demanded a ban
on buffalo capture, killing, and vaccination. Too risky, responded the agencies. A group
of state veterinarians and livestock producers asked to ramp up test and slaughter and
slash the herd to 1,800. Too aggressive, said the agencies. A diverse group of citizens
proposed a more moderate plan-if buffalo would not be confined to park land, why not
acquire more land? The Forest Service or public groups could buy ranchers' pastures and
turn them over to the buffalo. Too expensive, countered the agencies. The Fort Belknap
Indian Community, a conglomerate of two Montana-based tribes, suggested that tribes
could help to manage the park's buffalo, taking all wanderers to tribal land and managing
the disease in a way that fit their religious beliefs. The agencies replied that the Indian
community had been consulted and did not grant the tribes' request.
In the end, the agencies read the public's criticisms, weighed the evidence, printed
all the comments in voluminous books, and then put the books aside. In 2000, they
adopted their plan. The plan still applies today-largely because state and federal
agencies cannot agree on anything else.
At the Veterinary Diagnostics Laboratory in Bozeman, Montana, a display case
exhibits several animal diseases-carried by worms, bugs, and insects-that are safely
under control. Brucella abortus is not on the shelf. That's because the disease is an
epidemiological scourge-easy to transmit, hard to detect, and even harder to treat.
Transmission usually begins with birth. A cow's aborted calf drops onto the
grass, and the carcass is "steaming" with bacteria. If it's dropped in a cool, shady spot,
the bacteria can survive for up to three months. Anytime in that window, another host
can pick up the disease. Female cows flock to the site, drawn by a maternal hormone that
compels them to lick the dead fetus. Female elk and buffalo are also attracted. They lick.
They eat the grass. They swallow bacteria. The bacteria travel to the lymph nodes,
where they remain-undetectable-until the host becomes pregnant. Then the germs
travel to the uterus, where they multiply into the billions and cause another abortion,
which releases another contaminated fetus into the environment.
Jack Rhyan, an APHIS veterinarian, has researched the disease for more than a
decade. He is still looking for an effective treatment, but because the bacteria live inside
cells, they are expert evaders-of host defenses, of disease tests, and of antibiotic
treatments. Thus there's no effective treatment for cattle or wildlife. Though Rhyan
usually speaks scientifically about the disease, he can at times get exasperated by the
germ's wily nature: "I think the devil made it, and I think he made it really smart."
Like other wildlife diseases in the state, brucellosis is "a zoonotic disease, which
means animals can [also] pass it to humans," says Ryan Clarke, a regional epidemiologist
with APHIS. The bacteria cause flu-like symptoms in humans, which can last for life if
treatment isn't successful.
Before the 1930s, B. abortus caused widespread illness in the United States, as it
passed to consumers through unpasteurized cow's milk. With commercial pasteurization,
"most of the human cases have gone away," says Tom Linfield, the state veterinarian of
Montana, but he adds that some people are still at risk. Hunters around Yellowstone
must be careful when gutting kills, because bacteria from an infected reproductive tract
can enter their hands through an open wound. Veterinarians, ranchers, and slaughterhouse
workers can contract the disease in the same way.
Yet Montana reports fewer than two cases annually. Nationwide, only 100 to 200
cases of brucellosis occur per year, most in travelers who consume unpasteurized milk
products abroad. The primary fear these days, Linfield says, is not the human health risk
but the economic one-that in transmitting the disease to cattle, Yellowstone's wildlife
will lead ranchers and states to economic ruin.
But the risk of this happening is debatable. It correlates with how many of
Yellowstone's buffalo are infected. Yet pinning down this number is nearly impossible,
since there's no reliable brucellosis test. One can try testing the buffalo's blood for
antibodies against the bacteria-a test called serology. This test implies that about 50
percent of buffalo carry Brucella antibodies. But that number overestimates actual
infection. The antibodies are an aftereffect of infection. Buffalo retain them when they
have the bacteria; after they've expelled the bacteria; and when they've been exposed to,
but resisted, the bacteria. The next best test is to remove tissue from the buffalo and test
it for the actual organisms. That test suggests only 10 to 20 percent of Yellowstone's
buffalo carry the disease. Yet this test inevitably underestimatesinfection, for several
reasons: because the bacteria jump around the body; infected females harbor few
bacteria until they become pregnant; and the bacteria don't grow well in the lab. In the
end, no one knows how many buffalo in Yellowstone carry the disease.
Others argue that the numoer of infected animals does not matter unless it is zero.
Hagenbarth and Clarke are of that opinion. Clarke says that if just one buffalo aborts a
calf outside Yellowstone, and one cow comes to "lick and nudge and investigate," many
cows can wind up contracting the disease, and that is bad enough.
But the chances of this happening are also uncertain. Canadian bison expert
Cormack Gates has tried to settle it: "This is an epidemiological problem," he says.
For...transmission...to occur, you need an infected host. You need it to...disseminate
the organism from its body. And you need the availability of a susceptible host. These
were the conditions worked out by...Louis Pasteur many, many years ago."
Female buffalo are definitely known to disseminate bacteria: they drip vaginal
discharges onto the grass for cattle to eat, and as early as February and lasting into June,
they also abort, both inside and outside the park, and scavengers can drag the carcasses
far. Cattle are susceptible. Barnyard studies show that cows penned with infected
buffalo lick the aborted fetuses and become infected. Combine the results, and it would
seem that Yellowstone's female buffalo pose a risk to nearby ranchers. Most scientists,
state vets, and agencies agree on this.
Male buffalo are more difficult to assess. Infected bulls carry bacteria in their
semen. Linfield says bulls might mount female cows and drip semen in the grass, which
cattle might eat. From observation, Hagenbarth adds that mating is not necessary; cattle
bulls ejaculate spontaneously, so buffalo may, too. But Gates says he has never seen a
buffalo spontaneously ejaculate, and in his opinion the chance of a cow finding such a
small patch of grass is about the same as "space aliens" landing there. "There's
improbability all the way along," he says. The assured risk of allowing bulls outside the
park, he says, is that where bulls go, females and their fetuses follow.
A favorite statement of the Campaign is that no one has ever documented a
Yellowstone buffalo transmitting brucellosis to cattle in the wild. And it is true. Cattle in
every state bordering the park ha e become infected, but no one has ever traced an
infection back to the park's buffalo.
People give various explanations for this. The Campaign argues that buffalo
cannot transmit to cattle in the wild. Ranchers and the agencies, on the other hand, say
that they've worked since 1917-through vaccinating cattle, confining buffalo to the
park, and shooting wanderers-to prevent it from happening.
The true study needed-the field test in which Yellowstone's borders are opened,
local ranchers stop vaccinating cows, and everyone waits for results-cannot be done.
As a result, there is no direct way to assess the risk in nature.
The agencies' plan assumes the worst risk for buffalo, leaving everyone else to
argue. The rancher Hagenbarth sees a severe threat; a risk he's not willing to take. The
Campaign sees a risk "so low it is almost incalculable."
To complicate matters, Brucella abortus is not limited to buffalo, nor to
Yellowstone. Elk inside Yellowstone National Park, as well as in Idaho and Wyoming,
carry the disease. Yellowstone's elk are not a concern, say Linfield, Cherry, and Clarke,
because their infection rate is low. Moreover, in natural settings, elk give birth in
secluded woods and meticulously devour the afterbirth, before other animals can venture
near.
But in Wyoming, the settings are not natural. The state has elk feedgrounds, large
fields where elk are fed hay in the winter. The grounds exist because farms and houses
block the elk's paths to natural foraging grounds. Without them, elk would starve. But
feedgrounds create a reservoir of disease by clustering elk together and forcing births in a
community setting, which makes transmission common. On the Wyoming grounds,
brucellosis thrives, and transmissions to cattle have occurred. In 2003, a rancher grazing
cattle next to a Wyoming feedground acquired brucellosis in his herd, and as a result,
ranchers statewide had to test for disease. More elk-related infections have since
occurred in the state.
Scientists from Iowa State University concluded that closing the feedgrounds
would likely end infection in elk. Wyoming has haltingly begun a test-and-slaughter
program for its feedground elk, but as far as closing the grounds, Clarke doesn't think it
will happen any time soon. First, they are a state tradition. "They've allowed the
feedgrounds for almost a century," he says. Second, the grounds keep elk away from
ranchers' hay bales. They also keep elk populations large, which supports "hunting,
outfitting, and wildlife viewing-they're all big businesses in that part of the state,"
Clarke says. In keeping with Clarke's prediction, the Wyoming governor has refused
requests to close the grounds.
The Campaign seethes on this point-if elk run free because hunters desire it, the
organization contends, then buffalo should run free because wildlife advocates demand it.
Hagenbarth agrees there's a double-standard but argues that the Park and feedgrounds
need to rid both buffalo and elk of the disease. "You've got a gangrene leg, you cut it
off," he says.
Instead of doing that, managers have medicated. They've vaccinated buffalo, elk,
and cattle in the Yellowstone area. The vaccine helps by stemming the number of
aborted fetuses. In cattle, the vaccine stops 65 to 80 percent of abortions, but in buffalo
and elk less. Ranchers nonetheless find it useful because fewer abortions mean slower
disease spread.
Vaccinated cattle, though, can still become infected, and if the infection is
detected by APHIS, the rancher pays. Wyoming learned this in 2003 with the feedground
elk case, as the herd that became infected was vaccinated. The vaccine is no cure, but
"it's the only tool we've got," says veterinarian Rhyan.
Future tools for animals in and around Yellowstone might include better
brucellosis tests, more effective vaccines, contraceptives, and a rapid vaccine delivery
system. A Park Service-based group called the "Ballistics Consortium" is testing rifles
for firing vaccine bullets at Yellowstone's buffalo herds. But these tools aren't in
practice yet, and in spite of them, the battle rages on.
For nine years, the Campaign's media cabin, the center of its operation, has been
manned. There volunteers package what they see in the field and send it on to the public.
"We document every single action against the buffalo by state and federal agencies,"
explains one member. "We get it to every media source we can and to the world."
Inside, a real buffalo skull hangs on the wall with a rifle shell lodged above its eye. It's
there, members say, to remind them of the buffalo that have paid the ultimate price for
crossing Yellowstone's lines.
The channels they use to send information are numerous, including press releases,
newsletter updates from the field, and videos posted on-line. They speak out in Montana
newspapers and occasionally on local television news.
The lines of communication extend beyond the cabin like a spider's web to the
forty-eight contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and even abroad. If the Campaign's goal is
to forge an extended network of people attuned to the wandering buffalo, they've been
successful. "This November, I was in New Zealand," remarked a Montana resident, and
was surprised when a New Zealander asked him, "'how come the farmers are killing the
buffalo?'"
But the Campaign does not merely communicate to the public what is happening
in Yellowstone-they want action. On its website, the Campaign lists phone numbersof the Montana governor and park superintendent, to name a few-and asks supporters to
pick up and dial. "Please call Yellowstone National Park," one e-mail prodded, "and
urge them to abandon plans to slaughter our wild buffalo... They must hear from you
today! Do not let them ignore you as they are trying to do." The Campaign rallies
around National Call-In Days, when it pressures state officials to let buffalo freely roam
outside of park lines. The idea is to wear down the policymakers until they cave in:
"Help keep the pressure on the powers-that-be and don't let up until the wild buffalo are
set free!"
The most recent call-in day was early in February, and the targets were Suzanne
Lewis, Yellowstone's Superintendent, and Kate Gordon, President of the Church
Universal and Triumphant, a Gardiner-based religious organization. Lewis has obvious
influence, and the Church runs the largest livestock operation on buffalo range north of
the park. By morning, the public was responding, and calls were rolling in to
Yellowstone. "YNP received 500 calls and 2,000 e-mails...," a government memo
reported. The Church allegedly stopped answering the phone.
This method has begun to work on certain officials. At the beginning of his term
in 2004, Montana governor Brian Schweitzer supported the state-federal management
plan, even filing for a buffalo-hunting license. But that was then. Two years (and many
call-in days) later, his statements in the newspapers asked for more tolerance of buffalo in
Montana. When some buffalo were captured outside the park in early February, he asked
the agencies to set them free. They did.
Some agencies question the integrity of the Campaign's information-and-action
campaign, as its "facts" come mostly from its own members. Moreover, the Campaign
considers ridicule and mud-slinging as perfectly acceptable tactics. The result is what
some might call an anti-agency propaganda campaign. One winter update began:
On Friday in Gardiner, the National Park Service (NPS) was busy harassing wild buffalo,
protecting livestock interests ir-tead of the flora and fauna they are mandated by the
American people to protect. Park Rangers came out on horseback, dressed in cowboy
finery...and forced wild buffalo off of their winter range.
For those not moved by written accounts, videos and photos provide additional
fodder. One web video pans over a flock of white birds as the sound of a helicopter
rumbles in the background. Agitated, the birds flap, honk, and fly off. The Campaign
tells viewers that they have just witnessed a disturbance of trumpeter swans by the
agencies' buffalo-hazing helicopters. The agencies, they say, have committed yet another
crime against nature.
Marion Cherry from the Forest Service was disturbed when she first saw the
video. She knew Yellowstone hosted the swans, which her agency classifies as a
"sensitive" species, and that disturbing them was "a very bad thing," since it wore down
the birds' winter energy reserves. But something was odd about this scene.
Yellowstone's flock of trumpeters is small, and there were hundreds of birds in the video.
"I asked my friend to come over and look at this video," Cherry recalls. "She did her
master's thesis on trumpeter swans." As soon as Cherry pushed 'play,' the friend said:
"Those are snow geese." Cherry was annoyed. The Campaign had set off a false alarm.
Agency helicopters hadn't scattered sensitive birds but a flock of snow geese, which are
overly abundant. "Frankly, we can stand to lose a few snow geese in the world," she
said.
She asserts that the Campaign's website is riddled with other inaccuraciesmixing up locations, misinterpreting events, and sometimes reporting so ambiguously as
to lead readers to assume the worst. "I don't want to be critical because I think their
hearts are in the right place," Cherry says, "but I'd like people to be factual."
This point is significant because the Campaign's version of events in Yellowstone
is often the only "news" some people read. A recent battle in this news war was brought
up for discussion at a public meeting with Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks in January.
The Campaign had just made local game warden Jim Smolczynski the star of their latest
e-mail update, announcing that he had ignored an evening distress call from a
snowmobiler who hit a buffalo. The release said that the buffalo lay bloodied on the road
all night because Smolzynski did not want to "go out to deal with the situation."
No sooner did the Campaign's story reach e-mail inboxes than the phone at Fish,
Wildlife, and Parks began to ring. "I got a call from a woman in Seattle who asked why
our warden waited twelve hours to put a bison down in the field when he knew it was
wounded," said Melissa Frost from public affairs at the meeting. But the story wasn't
true; Smolczynski hadn't gotten the message until morning.
Another game warden stood up and chided the Campaign: "We are sensitive to
wounded animals. I'm not going to say...that we don't make mistakes. Because we do.
... [But] Jim didn't do anything wrong. So I would appreciate if we could keep trying to
figure out what really happened before either of us go to the next step. That's all I have
to say."
The Campaign seemed indifferent to the scolding. "I guess we made them mad,"
said Brister after the meeting, with a shrug.
Some wars are waged on battlefields; this one takes place in the media.
If the Campaign had its way, the war would escalate to the courtroom. Various
groups have gone to court over this issue at least twelve times since 1985. Josh Osher,
the Campaign's policy coordinator, says that his group desires a petition to put
Yellowstone's buffalo on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Threatened and
Endangered Species List. Such a listing would wrap layers of red tape around any
agency wanting to write a restrictive buffalo policy, as every action would have to be
approved by the Fish and Wildlife Service.
To get the animals listed, Osher would tell judges that Yellowstone's buffalo are a
distinct population of the larger North American Plains bison subspecies. The
19 th
century slaughter left just a few plains bison in the country-some on ranches, plus the
twenty-three wild ones in Yellowstone. The descendants of those scattered survivors
went on to various fates, most kept behind fences or bred with cattle. But Osher would
argue that Yellowstone's bison were never fenced or mixed with cattle. To him, they are
the only descendants that have remained truly wild. "I think the argument is strong," he
says. "But you'd be in court a lot. And it costs a lot of money to do that." The group's
funds barely cover rent and are too sparse to support a lawsuit. Consequently, the media
war is its low-budget alternative.
Hagenbarth is disgusted by environmentalists who "abuse" and "misuse"
protective wildlife laws to get what they want. "It's tyranny by the minority," he says.
The rancher instead chose the political arena to advance his policies. In the summer of
1995, he traveled to the Montana state capital to hand his testimony to senator Conrad
Burns. Burns was about to go to Washington to address a senate subcommittee dealing
with the buffalo issue. To exert influence, Hagenbarth deliberately maneuvered himself
into the leadership of a powerful Montana interest group. "My name is Jim Hagenbarth,"
his statement began, "and I am the chairman of the Montana Board of Livestock." His
well-crafted words told the committee that it was time for Yellowstone to change its
buffalo policy.
According to Hagenbarth, the Park's policy was too lax. By sheltering diseased
buffalo, he said, the Park Service was making Yellowstone a haven for disease. As long
as its buffalo and elk were infected, Montana ranchers would have to vaccinate their
cows. "We can't afford to have a zoonotic disease in wildlife. It's not reasonable," he
testified.
Hagenbarth implored the Park Service to try something different-go inside its
borders and kill buffalo until no disease remained. The land was mountainous, but the
Park had helicopters. Buffalo ran, but portable corrals would contain them. The expense
and difficulty, he asserted, were not prohibitive. He gave the committee logic. APHIS
and ranchers managed brucellosis in cattle in exactly this manner. Since 1934, they had
spent more than $3 billion on testing and slaughtering "millions of cattle in thousands of
herds that occupied millions upon millions of acres." Surely, he argued, the park could
handle about 3,000 buffalo on two million acres. "If we can clean the brucellosis up out
of the herds of cattle, you can clean it up out of wildlife."
Then he turned on the guilt: "We have not forgotten all the sacrifices made and
we do not want to ride that trail again. I cannot imagine how those ranchers felt that had
infected herds and cleaned up their herds via test and slaughter or whole herd
condemnation. The cure for brucellosis is a tough pill to swallow, but our industry has
taken its medicine, and we don't want to repeat the treatment."
"For thirty years, the park has refused to address this disease, and the liability to
the park's neighbors caused by brucellosis is becoming a burden too heavy to bear. We
need relief," he concluded. "Support Senate Bill 745 to force the park to accept their
responsibilities and cooperate in cleansing the nation of this disease," he urged the
committee. The bill died in subcommittee, never reaching the Senate floor.
Before the 2000 plan was finalized, the rancher made a final plea. This time, he
traveled personally to Washington, D.C., to address the Council on Environmental
Quality, which had the ear of President Clinton. Some heads nodded as he made his case
for disease eradication, but in the znd no one took action. Hagenbarth returned to his
ranch to stew.
The government's indifference angers Hagenbarth to this day. When he met with
the Council, the cattle industry was nearly free of the disease. Ranchers and APHIS had
reduced the number of infected herds in the United States from a booming 124,000 in the
1950s to just six in the summer of 2000, to zero known infections that winter. "The
battle is nearly won," BeefMagazine announced in April of 2001. But in May, an
infection popped up-and then four more did. The following year, a group of infected
elk wandered out of Yellowstone onto an Idaho ranch, where a cattle rancher had been
imprudently feeding them over several winters. His cattle became infected and were
slaughtered. Soon after, more infections appeared in other states. The disease was on its
way up again.
Many things in Yellowstone present a false face. The buffalo look docile, but
during breeding season, they charge one another like battering rams. The geysers seem
quiet enough, but wait around, and they'll spray scalding water into the air. Likewise,
poke around the buffalo issue, and you will uncover something unexpected-a conflict
that has nothing to do with buffalo.
For instance, ask about cows. Where do cows belong? "Asia," says Kurtz.
"Wisconsin," says Michaud, "where there's lots of water." Cows, many Campaign
members believe, destroy the western landscape. They forage on land that belongs to
wild grazers. They drain too much water from the dry ground, require expansive
feedlots, overgraze the native grasses, and muck up streams. The phrase "boycott beef"
is often tossed out in Campaign meetings and e-mails, and they follow suit-no
hamburgers are served at their cabin. Ranchers, some of the less moderate members
believe, have no place in Montana. "Less than two percent of the United States'
livestock are produced in Montana," notes Kurtz. "Let's get them out of here."
Hagenbarth feels threatened by such ideas. "It's very, very serious," he says.
Certain individuals in the "environmental community...are flat-ass trying to move [us].
They don't like livestock and they don't like these ranchers that have all this
ground...even though we are the ones that are generally most friendly to them... They
don't want us out there. They're doing everything they can to destroy us. And most of
the other people who donate their money don't have any idea what's going on."
"They have most of the continent," argues Kurtz. "I would like to see cows away
from the few places that are pristine." But Hagenbarth disagrees with these members'
vision of a rancher-less state. He thinks ranchers fill an important role in the west,
maintaining the open-space vistas that he values. If he is forced to move off his land, he
says it will be sold to the highest bidder. And rich bidders are not conservation groups,
but developers. If ranchers are forced to leave, he warns, the West will become a
continuous spread of tract houses and Wal-Marts.
But the conflict runs even deeper than that. Ask about wild animals, and you will
uncover another tussle. The Campaign covets wild animals. Michaud describes his first
visit to the Costa Rican rainforest, where he first observed monkeys in the wild. "We
cried for about one hour," he admits. "Seeing the look of the animals.. when they look at
you... You can feel a connection. You don't connect that much in a town...It only
happens in nature."
Kurtz is sure of one thing about wilderness: it does not belong in boxes called
parks. "We have this view," he says. "We like wild places and wild species, but we only
give it a little box." We want "biological islands... We'll just have our little boxes of
wildness." Kurtz would like to restore buffalo to the entire Great Plains but would settle
for an expansion beyond park boundaries.
Hagenbarth, on the other hand, believes that wild animals belong in boxes.
"They've got four to seven million acres...whatever it is," he says about Yellowstone.
"That's a grand experiment. But you cannot manage the [surrounding] area...that way.
It's just not reasonable."
The groups differ as well in their views on land use. Hagenbarth believes land
should be owned and managed by people. Good managers add value to land by making it
able to sustain human use. Land that is managed well is stable, with a diverse mix of
plants and animals. The longer a manager can maintain this mix, says the rancher, the
better he has done his job, and the more he is worth.
Frazier, in keeping with Crow traditions, believes that land shouldn't be owned at
all. "Who would have thought that you could measure out a little piece and you could
own a part of the universe?" he wonders.
Tunnel deeper, and the rift grows. The groups differ so fundamentally as to clash
on their very views of life and death. Hagenbarth, who grew up watching farm animals
go to slaughter, understands death as part of a cycle. "Life is a privilege. It's a privilege
to be born. Along with that comes with the obligation to die...That's just how it is." He
thinks wildlife advocates' opposition to buffalo slaughter is at its root an inability to
accept death. "They're not taught that death is part of the system," he says.
The buffalo are one blip of a much larger picture, a snapshot of neighbors who
have evolved entirely different views of the world. Their true problem is the inability to
reconcile.
Every so often, someone suggests that Yellowstone could solve its buffalo
problem with a big fence. But a fence would trap not only buffalo, but thousands of other
migratory animals inside the park.
Others, mostly scientists, look to medical solutions. Jack Rhyan thinks that in the
future park rangers might use a fast delivery system-say, rifles or animal feed-to
administer vaccines, antibiotics, and contraceptives to the park's diseased buffalo. This
would stop the buffalo from shedding bacteria. If at the same time Wyoming cleaned up
its elk feedgrounds, animals in the Yellowstone area would no longer transmit the
disease. With no new hosts, the bacteria would perish with the last infected animals and
vanish within a few generations of wildlife. Then the buffalo could run free. But this is a
distant projection considering the current state of technology. There is no animal feed
laced with antibiotics. The vaccines are still not very effective. And the contraceptives
must be injected and "boosted" annually, or else surgically implanted into the buffalo.
Rhyan also wonders whether ridding Yellowstone of disease would quell the fight at all,
since the debate runs deeper than that. He says, with a laugh, that with the disease
around, "everybody's opinion is valid," with it gone, "everybody still thinks their opinion
is valid." Something more may be needed.
Montana governor Schweitzer is pursuing land deals. He estimates that the
hazing and slaughtering of buffalo in 2006 cost taxpayers $950,000. Less than that
amount could be spent paying ranchers not to graze cattle near the park. This idea
closely follows a widely-supported plan proposed by Montana citizens in 1998.
Moreover, the Forest Service, along with conservation groups, has already bargained with
ranchers to close all but one of the public grazing allotments near park borders. They've
done this using land "swaps": finding ranchers better allotments elsewhere and paying
them to move their cattle. Schweitzer is going one step further--offering money to
ranchers in the Gardiner and Horse Butte areas to give up their cattle. The ranchers could
stay, but their private land would be turned over to buffalo (and other wildlife). If
everyone in Gardiner and Horse Butte agreed, the deals would draw new lines around the
park, attaching wings to the north and west borders of the square. Buffalo could roam the
wings, but the state would hunt them aggressively to stop them from going any farther.
Schweitzer's plan would untie a few knots: buffalo would have winter habitat, the
slaughter would end, and ranchers, both near and far, would be protected from
brucellosis.
But his idea has met some resistance from ranchers. One reluctant rancher told
the governor that his cows were "part of the family, too." Another was concerned about
the conversion of his front yard into buffalo "killing fields." But Seay from the
Campaign told the Chronicle the deals were a "positive step," at least allowing the
buffalo more room to roam.
Cormack Gates suggests that a more permanent solution will require healing
social wounds. In 2004, the Park Service had called on him to referee yet another buffalo
dispute that had gone to court-whether buffalo used winter roads to migrate to their
deaths. Gates visited Yellowstone to assess buffalo movements. As part of his
assessment, he interviewed 3,000 people in the Yellowstone area, including agency
scientists, HOBNOB residents, members of the Campaign and other wildlife advocacy
groups, and rancher representatives.
Gates made his ruling on the roads (they did not lead more buffalo to their deaths)
and then put aside the science. In his report, he frankly concluded that the groups have
simply lost the ability to be civil. They weren't looking for common solutions, but
instead wielding laws and lawsuits like weapons. Gates blames this on poor governance.
No avenue has ever existed for ranchers, agency scientists, environmentalists, Native
Americans, and other groups to negotiate-not through charged public meetings,
accusations thrown across courtrooms, or stale form letters. Rather than being engaged
in dialogue, all the groups fell back on adversarial relationships. That led to
pigeonholing, a disenfranchised public, and people of moderation becoming extreme in
their beliefs. In short, it created the same volatile conditions that spark real wars.
His recommendation: group therapy. Find the people with the most in common;
set rules of respectful engagement and start them talking; repeat the process until all
groups are talking. Such techniques can often lead to a give-and-take, even among
people with the most entrenched values. Gates says this is the path toward consensus-a
solution for which all, from public to government, can say, "well, I can truly live with
that, as opposed to I guess I have to agree."
Nedra Chandler is a Montana-based mediator who has worked in public dispute
resolution for seventeen years. She cautions against the wishful belief that most
conflicts can be solved through negotiation as long as the right people are brought
together, in the right way, at the right time. "There's a tendency among us to romanticize
it," she says. But some conflicts are permanently stuck at an impasse. Sometimes groups
prefer to be adversaries, decision makers will not negotiate, or there are no funds to
sponsor discussions. Even worse, sometimes hard-won agreements are squashed by
people outside of the discussion process; for example, by the President. Chandler speaks
of conflicts being both "appropriate" and "ripe" for negotiation. "Cormack Gates started
to see some promise," she says. "I think that's fascinating." The next step would be a
systematic assessment of the groups involved. Would someone fund discussions? Do
groups think they'll gain more from negotiating than litigating? Are the managing
agencies willing to participate? A "no" to any of these would kill the process before it
began.
"Always, the question is, have things simply gone too far?" Cormack Gates asks.
"Are people so polarized at this point that they cannot possibly come together?" He says
that such a deadlock is rare. And even in the buffalo wars, there are signs of hope.
One hangs on the wall of Jim Hagenbarth's office. It's a poster of an odd-looking
bird, about the size of a chicken, with a spiky tail that stands tall. "That's a grouse,"
Hagenbarth says. "He's struttin'." The sage grouse, a candidate for the Threatened and
Endangered Species List, nests under the sagebrush bushes that dot Hagenbarth's land
and much of a "sagebrush sea" that covers the western plains. In 2003 Hagenbarth joined
a small group of community members in Idaho to write a local plan for conserving sage
grouse habitat.
Other efforts toward conservation appear on his land. An irrigation system,
powered by gravity, that uses snowmelt from the mountains to water the fields. A barn
made out of recycled telephone poles. A fence that bars his cattle from the Big Hole
River, where they might disturb wildlife. A grazing rotation system that protects native
plant species. Indeed, he is far from the archetypal cowboy the Campaign thinks him to
be. "We don't just ravage the land," he insists of ranchers. "I love the land...That's
where the value is. It's not in the livestock."
He still supports disease eradication and says other ranchers value cattle more
than he does, but he thinks the ranching community is tired of fighting and is willing to
negotiate. "We're worn out," he says. "You don't take a bat and beat someone up if you
want something... You solve problems by sitting down and rationally talking about
things, and [by] understanding their feelings and your feelings... you...find solutionscommon solutions-and commoi ground."
That's what happened with the sage grouse. The ranchers, biologists, and
environmentalists deliberated and reached an agreement on how to manage the birds. It
took them five years and the help of a professional mediator to do it. Hagenbarth
describes the early stages of the process as a struggle to "openly listen to people... and not
jump on them every time they ma[de] a mistake," but diverse groups, from
environmentalist to state game warden, still support their plan today.
At a January public meeting, Sam Sheppard of Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks,
offered another inkling of hope. While in the spotlight of the Campaign's video cameras
and in the midst of the argument about Jim Smolczynski, he said: "This is an honest
appeal to you guys to be fair in how you treat our employees... We're committed to being
fair, and responsive, and honest with you...This is all about building trust between
our...groups and agencies." Seay, who had sniggered and scoffed throughout the
meeting, softened, and her tone changed. She uttered an apology: "I know I come
across as hostile, but that's because I very much care about the buffalo," she said. "These
are healthy discussions, you know....It always seems we're fighting each other...I
appreciate us being able to sit face-to-face and talk about these things." A kind gesture
directed the relationship away from antagonism, at least on that day.
"We can talk about deep values...connected to bison, and public lands, and
animal rights, even if we don't solve the problems right away," says mediator Chandler.
A laying down of armor, a display of genuine engagement, and a shift in give-and-take
is a start. "That's as good as it gets sometimes," says Chandler, "and that's pretty good."
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